Saving money and getting healthy by eating from the garden

Garden in December, Eastern NC, Zone 7b

Beginning of December…Wow. A lot has changed, huh? No more green. The blueberry bushes are a lovely red. Everything else is either covered with cloth, plastic, or mulch and manure.

We are letting the chickens out twice a day, since they are getting less greens in the run. They spend a lot of time in the garden. I’m having a hard time seeing where my neat patches are.See all the divots? Those are from the chickens. They love the newly mulched/fertilized areas. Ah, well. They do a good job eating bugs and leaving more fertilizer. I just have to make sure I keep them out of my uncovered carrot patch and my newly-planted bulbs…two of their favorite spots, of course. 😉

So, what’s going on in the garden at the beginning of December? As I said before, most everything is covered in mulch and manure, resting for the winter. There are a few green sections from the garden.

#1 The celery patch (bottom of photo)#2 Lettuce, kale, broccoli (raised bed)#3 Next to the raised bed, is another raised bed with some uncovered spinach. I mulched heavily and it is doing well so far. I may need to cover it later.(that would be a sunflower plant stem in the middle – still letting them decompose more so I can rip them out without taking half of the soil with it)

#4 I still have some carrots growing (though the chickens keep getting into the patch to eat all of the greenery). #5 Hoop house – previously, the plants were covered in cloth & staked down. Now, the whole hoop house is covered in plastic.

The first picture was taken the day I took off the staked cloth and covered it in plastic (notice how everything is bent from being pressed down).A couple days later… Big difference, huh? Everything is unfurling quite nicely 🙂

I have cabbage, kale, celery, broccoli, and wild onions in this hoop house.

The broccoli was my main reason for deciding to cover the hoop house in plastic. They were frost-bitten quite a bit.I am hoping they will bounce back but I’m not sure.

I used to pull all of the wild onions, treating them like a weed; but lately, I’ve just been pulling the largest ones and using them when cooking. They are stronger-tasting and do not grow very big. That works well though because instead of cooking half of a store-bought onion, I can just chop up 2-3 small wild onions.

December TO DO:

I would LOVE to weed, mulch, and spread manure on the rest of the garden by the end of 2014 but it has been so cold around here, I have not had much motivation. I am not even halfway done 😛 January is typically my pruning month. Maybe I can finish weeding, mulching, and fertilizing in February so I can start planting in March.

What does your garden look like in December? Do you garden throughout the winter? Please share some tips with me! I would love to have four times as much growing in my garden right now. I need some hand holding when it comes to winter gardening, covering plants, etc. I am pretty much clueless! 😛